P3D V4.5 & Process Lasso

[iFlySimX 748]

Hello! I wanted to get your opinions to see if you think Process Lasso is worth it for P3D V4.5. I curenlty have an i7 4770K and it bottlenecks. The question is, will it help better manage P3D and my cores and potentially improve performance? I am sick of hearing my fan go high speed and make a lot of noise. I must also say that I am OC to 4.4ghz. Thanks all!

Edited August 2, 2019 by Le Français

[SKEWR 364]

You'll probably get 55 different answers. I think it works. One user sarcastically said I bought "snake oil" without having a shred of information.No,wait, they got their info from some old FSX info. Regardless my system showed improvement. If there is a trial for PL, try it on and off to determine if it works for YOU.

There are several topics that discuss this issue. Try looking up the very helpful user,  SteveW for more REAL info.

 

Good luck!

[Boomer 1,619]

Dunno about it being snake oil but it does casue my P3dV4 to crash when I use it to move the sim to cores 2-5.

[F737MAX 5,508]

As I have more cores, I only use PL to move all other programs away from cores 0 and 1 to give free rein to P3D to use them by itself.

Try using the Affinity Mask Calculator from Gatwick-FSG for a P3D affinity mask and use PL to move programs / background processes away from core 0 and maybe one other core that shows heavy demand from the sim.

As already pointed out, you can use the trial period to test PL and see if it works for you.
 

[onebob 125]

My spec's are the same as yours, It was originally clocked at 4,4 and ran at that for a few years but 12 months ago started having BSOD. I set it down to 4.2 and it runs smooth with the normal addons, rex Sky Force, EF, ASP4, GA airplanes, GTN750, EZCA, ORBX scenery. Have been using  PL for a while with no problems.

At the moment running Prepar3D 4.5 on all corers with the addons on 1-7

Have changed the water cooler recently and I think that has helped.

 

bob

 

Edited August 2, 2019 by onebob

[Rogen 1,087]

I have a Ryzen and I find Process Lassoo a quite useful tool for P3D.

I also run quite a few addins and use Process Lassoo to assign a group of cores to those addins, essentually the last 4 cores are dedicated to addins (out of 16 cores) e.g RealTrim, Active Sky, banking camera, LRM, Little Nav Map, etc. basically anything to do with P3D that is not actually P3D itself. There is a degree of tuning here depending on how hungary the addin is for processor resources, where generally if trialling a new addin I'll start with 4 cores and adjust if required.

P3D itself is dedicated to cores 0 and cores 2 to 15, the intention being to allow P3D to have pretty much dedicated use of physical processor zero (cores 0 & 1) as core 0 only and then use the rest as it sees fit.

Also have set P3D to run with a priority of Above Normal.

For those who say "snake oil", I wouldn't say that at all, infact just last night I experiemented with allowing P3D to use all cores instead of 0 and 2 to 15 and ended up with a drop in fps. I wouldn't say it is a miracle worker, rather a useful tool in the neverending quest to squezee the best performance out of the sim.

My Ryzen itself is OC to 4.1 Ghz using a Noctua tower cooler which has to be the best cooler I've ever used, not only does it cool very well, but is also very quiet, it is a big unit though.

If you are looking @ purchasing Process Lassoo be aware you'll need to create an account to buy, plus there is usually a 50% off code available from Softpedia.

Cheers

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

2 hours ago, Le Français said:

Hello! I wanted to get your opinions to see if you think Process Lasso is worth it for P3D V4.5. I curenlty have an i7 4770K and it bottlenecks. The question is, will it help better manage P3D and my cores and potentially improve performance? I am sick of hearing my fan go high speed and make a lot of noise. I must also say that I am OC to 4.4ghz. Thanks all!

I've also got a 4770K and manage it just fine without PL..

Fan high speed means that you are fully loading up your CPU.. no amount of PL will change that IMHO.

Do you run your 4770K with HT on or off?

[newtie 533]

19 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

I've also got a 4770K and manage it just fine without PL..

Agreed. I have the same processor @4.2

I no longer use systems to manage systems.

I'm in and have been in manual mode for quite some time now.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

43 minutes ago, newtie said:

Agreed. I have the same processor @4.2

Just a question.. did you raise any voltages to get 4.2 stable?

I have been running @4.2 for some time at stock voltages, but recently have been getting the odd blue screen, which led me to back off to 4.1  (HT enabled).

Just wonder if I need to raise the CPU voltage a hair to keep things stable..

On the other hand, it may just be summer temperatures, combined with lack of dust removal, that are the cause

Edited August 3, 2019 by Bert Pieke

[Mace 1,902]

I do not use PL anymore.

I have had better results moving other apps off Core0 (like Activesky, Chaseplane, etc.) via batch files, and let P3D use all available cores.

[deltaalpha 0]

5 hours ago, Mace said:

I do not use PL anymore.

I have had better results moving other apps off Core0 (like Activesky, Chaseplane, etc.) via batch files, and let P3D use all available cores.

Not to hijack the thread but how did you find the affinity to set the addons? I have a 9900k do I use the Gatwick affinity mask calculator and choose all cores other than zero to get the affinity for addons or do you use something else?

[Mace 1,902]

1 hour ago, deltaalpha said:

Not to hijack the thread but how did you find the affinity to set the addons? I have a 9900k do I use the Gatwick affinity mask calculator and choose all cores other than zero to get the affinity for addons or do you use something else?

I used a calculator (windows calc, in programmer mode, has a binary and hex mode).  For 12 cores (I do run hyperthreading for my 6-core) that would be 1111 1111 1100, which is FFC in hex, and the FFC is what goes in the batch file, not the binary.

So, for you, lets assume you are not using hyperthreading, (as most 9900K guys report that their sim runs better without).  This means you have 8 cores.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but If you want core 0 and 1 free, you would do 1111 1100 in the calc, which gives a hex value of FC.  (If I ran a 9900K that is probably what I would do -- keep addons off core0 and core1, but I would have to test that of course, maybe I would just keep them off Core0). 

Now, the batch file would look something like this:

@ECHO OFF
echo.
echo Starting ActiveSky with AffinityMask . . .
start "ActiveSky" /affinity FC "D:\FSTools\AS_P3Dv4\AS_P3Dv4.exe"
echo Starting SimSounds with AffinityMask . . .
start "SimSounds" /affinity FC "D:\FSTools\SimSounds\SimSounds.exe"
echo Starting ChasePlane with AffinityMask . . .
start "Chaseplane" /affinity FC "D:\FSTools\OldProp Solutions Inc\ChasePlane\ChasePlane.exe"
echo.
 

That's how I do it.  I start the batch file first, then P3D.  Actually I have another batch file that moves UTL off Core 0 and 1, which I run after the UTL loads in the sim.

If you don't run HT, maybe you can simply move things off Core0.  I haven't heard from the 9900K users about that, but I'm sure some of them would have some input on that.

[deltaalpha 0]

8 hours ago, Mace said:

I used a calculator (windows calc, in programmer mode, has a binary and hex mode).  For 12 cores (I do run hyperthreading for my 6-core) that would be 1111 1111 1100, which is FFC in hex, and the FFC is what goes in the batch file, not the binary.

So, for you, lets assume you are not using hyperthreading, (as most 9900K guys report that their sim runs better without).  This means you have 8 cores.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but If you want core 0 and 1 free, you would do 1111 1100 in the calc, which gives a hex value of FC.  (If I ran a 9900K that is probably what I would do -- keep addons off core0 and core1, but I would have to test that of course, maybe I would just keep them off Core0). 

Now, the batch file would look something like this:

@ECHO OFF
echo.
echo Starting ActiveSky with AffinityMask . . .
start "ActiveSky" /affinity FC "D:\FSTools\AS_P3Dv4\AS_P3Dv4.exe"
echo Starting SimSounds with AffinityMask . . .
start "SimSounds" /affinity FC "D:\FSTools\SimSounds\SimSounds.exe"
echo Starting ChasePlane with AffinityMask . . .
start "Chaseplane" /affinity FC "D:\FSTools\OldProp Solutions Inc\ChasePlane\ChasePlane.exe"
echo.
 

That's how I do it.  I start the batch file first, then P3D.  Actually I have another batch file that moves UTL off Core 0 and 1, which I run after the UTL loads in the sim.

If you don't run HT, maybe you can simply move things off Core0.  I haven't heard from the 9900K users about that, but I'm sure some of them would have some input on that.

Awesome, thank you, I will try this. I guess I should’ve mentioned that I have hyper threading off. Maybe I’ll try both, keeping addons off core 0 and off cores 0/1. Thanks again.

[Tomaz Drnovsek 440]

If you have 9900K you most definitely don't need Process Lasso. Seriously.

I have 4790K with no HT and use it just to move other addons from Core0 because usually this one gets maxed out. Do not use PC to assign P3D to cores and stuff. If you must then use Affinity mask but you really don't need to. 

If it actually helps... I'm not really sure. The weaker your computer is the more it can help, probably.

[Luke 782]

The Windows NT kernel scheduler has been aware of multiple cores for about a quarter century now and will run a process on an under-utilized core if it can. 🙂

Cheers!